MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator MARIELLE SMITH (South Australia) (16:52): I also rise to contribute to the debate on this urgency motion. The Albanese Labor government fights to keep Australian industry. We fight for good industrial jobs in Australia and for Australians.
That is why we're building a modern energy system and reserving Australian gas for Australian industry. We're putting our shoulder to the wheel and rebuilding Australia's industrial base, and we're doing that because we know that a stronger Australia is an Australia that can make more of what it needs here at home. Australia has the workers, the resources, the energy and the ideas that the world needs, and our government's Future Made in Australia agenda is turning those strengths into jobs, investment and resilient supply chains.
This is not about making everything; it is about making more here in Australia, adding more value to Australian resources and ensuring that the benefits flow to workers, to local businesses and to local communities. It's about backing the strategic capabilities Australia needs: renewable and reliable energy, critical minerals processing, green metals, defence and advanced technologies, and world-class research and innovation.
Rebuilding and strengthening Australia's industrial base is hard work. Establishing new industries is not a linear process. But our government unashamedly backs Australian industry, we back Australian jobs and we back Australian workers, just as we have in Whyalla.
Of course, this is a very difficult time for the people of Whyalla. The announcement by the administrator of the steelworks that the efforts to restart the blast furnace over recent months were unsuccessful will impact on workers, their families and the broader community. And it is clear that years of failure to invest in the steelworks mean that it is now beyond repair.
What these workers in Whyalla need now more than ever is a government that backs them in, that acknowledges how tirelessly they have worked throughout this challenging period. They need a government that is committed to a domestic steel manufacturing industry and a government that is securing the long-term future of the Whyalla steelworks alongside the local jobs and the local families who rely on it.
We believe in a future made in Australia, we believe in a strong future for Whyalla and we believe in Australian industry and all of its potential. That's why our government established the national reconstruction fund, a $15 billion investment fund to back Australian industry and to drive the industries of tomorrow. To date, that fund has announced 32 investments, totalling some $1.83 billion across resources, biotech, artificial intelligence, food and beverage manufacturing, housing and quantum development.
The work of that fund to grow domestic industrial capabilities is central to our economic security, and it's central to our resilience. This work is more important now than ever. Together, through the national reconstruction fund, targeted Future Made in Australia programs and smelter interventions, the Albanese Labor government is making Australia stronger and ensuring that our resources, energy, skills and ideas are creating value for Australians.
We are strengthening supply chains, crowding in private investment and building the industrial base our country will need for decades to come. We're supporting jobs in our industrial heartlands, and we are creating the jobs of the future. What workers want and what industry needs right now is a government that backs them in.
What they need is a government that believes in their potential and that believes in a future for local manufacturing—and one that not just believes in it but is prepared to stand up for it. What they don't need is an opposition that talks them down. What they don't need is an opposition that abandons them.
They don't need representation like they've had from the Liberal Party in the past. We all remember Joe Hockey, on the floor of the other place, goading the car industry to leave Australia, to leave my home state of South Australia, to turn their back on South Australian workers, to turn their back on Elizabeth and to turn their back on our state. And do you know what?
After they goaded them to do it, they did. Our state has lived with the consequences of that. Our government and the Malinauskas government have been trying to do something about it.
Workers in our state remember the Liberal Party's record on that. We remember how you behaved then. We'll remember how you respond now.
Workers in my state want a government that will back them in, not an opposition that will talk them down.